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‘Cooking Isn’t Creative, and It Isn’t Easy’

Christopher Kimball outside the Vermont house where the show “Cook’s Country” is produced.Credit
Ryan Pfluger for The New York Times

Inside the renovated Le Bernardin in Midtown Manhattan, the pink flowers are as tall as dogwoods and the latticework walls give off a coppery, sci-fi sheen, and Christopher Kimball, the most influential home cook in America, prods a fork into an appetizer of Wagyu beef, langoustine and osetra caviar from China. He pulls apart the cylinder and glances skeptically inside. “I’m happier eating at Di Fara,” he claims, meaning the slice parlor in an Orthodox Jewish section of Midwood, Brooklyn, that has been occasionally hounded by the city’s Health Department. “Just real pizza,” Kimball enthuses. “No duck sausage and crap.” It’s true that he appears out of place amid the restaurant’s boardroom-in-space décor; with his bow tie, suspenders and severely parted hair, Kimball looks like someone who might’ve sold homeowners’ insurance to Calvin Coolidge.

What he does cop to enjoying about Le Bernardin is the wait staff — the thick-necked Levantine men in black tunics who start at his merest gesture and address him as “Monsieur Kim-BALL,” making everyone at the table wonder, not entirely in jest, whether they’ve been made to take French diction lessons. Kimball appreciates their formality and sheer number — the service here impresses him as serious and old-fashioned, qualities he appears to value above all. You’d probably guess as much after paging through Cook’s Illustrated, the oddly Victorian black-and-white cooking manual that Kimball began 19 years ago and continues to edit and publish every other month. For covers he favors Flemish-style oil paintings of food and illustrates recipes with spidery pen drawings and boring fonts — a look Kimball based on an antique brochure for the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, believing it would make the magazine feel, in his words, “authoritative and timeless.”

“Timeless” being the operative adjective — in the sense of paring away everything lighthearted, stylish or pertaining to the idea of the zeitgeist. It’s a truism that eating in the United States has changed more in the last 25 years than in the preceding 50. Since he got into publishing, in 1980, Kimball has watched the arrival of California nouvelle and Asian fusion, the farm-to-table movement, Whole Foods and the gourmet supermarket, convenience-store sushi, the celebrity chef and the contemporary urban foodie cum blogger, and he has managed to ignore them all. In simplest terms, Cook’s Illustrated focuses on preparing middlebrow American dishes at home with supermarket ingredients and omits everything glossy cooking magazines have come to be known for. If you are interested in recreating a Tuscan-style Passover feast or wonder what David Chang, the Momofuku Ko chef, thinks about contemporary art, Cook’s Illustrated may not be for you. You won’t find wine columns and lavish photography, travelogues about the street markets of Morocco or plugs for heritage microgreens and porcini-infused balsamics. Restaurants — the editorial protein of the glossies — have been entirely banished. There aren’t even ads. Most noticeably, the magazine dispenses with the tone that the critic Alexander Cockburn described as “cookbook pastoral” — the sense that the ideal dinner is a sit-down for 16 with candlelight and hydrangea and unbridled toasting, a pseudo-Mediterranean hedonism that precludes wailing toddlers and mismatched silverware. And nothing makes Kimball angrier than the aspirational pipe dreams marketed by the likes of Ina Garten and Bon Appétit. “I hate the idea that cooking should be a celebration or a party,” Kimball told me over a bowl of chicken-and-vegetable soup at his regular lunch haunt, a Brookline, Mass., pub called Matt Murphy’s. “Cooking is about putting food on the table night after night, and there isn’t anything glamorous about it.”

At the core of C.I.’s M.O. are two intrepid observations Kimball has made about the innermost psychology of home cooks. Namely that they 1) are haunted by a fear of humiliation, and 2) will not follow a recipe to the letter, believing that slavishly following directions is an implicit admission that you cannot cook. (When Kimball laid this out for me, I shuddered with recognition.) What the magazine essentially offers its readers is a bargain: if they agree to follow the recipes as written, their cooking will succeed and they will be recognized by family and friends as competent or even expert in the kitchen. To this end, every 32-page issue of the magazine presents a handful of recipes that have been made “bulletproof,” to use a Kimballism, i.e., worried into technical infallibility after weeks of testing so exacting as to bring an average home cook to the brink of neurasthenia. The bargain further holds that the peppercorn-crusted filet of beef or butterscotch-cream pie will turn out not only in C.I.’s professional kitchen, with its All-Clad pans and DCS ranges, but also on a lowly electric four-top, using a dull knife and a $20 nonstick skillet.

The bargain’s appeal is, at root, visceral. To cook well at home is to begin to master the quotidian, to wrest a measure of control over the entropy of day-to-day living. I began reading the magazine as a fearful, ungainly cook several years ago, and I remember the inordinate pride I took in putting on the table, for the first time, a basic but creditable Thanksgiving dinner, made entirely with C.I. recipes. My experience, I have since learned, is actually fairly common. Editor after editor at C.I. recounts stories of readers, a surprising number of whom turn out be white, middle-aged men, who’ve approached them at public events to offer thanks for “teaching me how to cook,” voices froggy with emotion. Kimball views his bond with home cooks as a solemn responsibility. These days, online surveys allow the magazine’s editors to communicate with readers in minutes; no story idea gets into the running unless it surveys well, and no tested recipe is complete unless at least 80 percent of those who tried it at home — thousands of uncompensated volunteers known as Friends of Cook’s — say they would make it again.

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At the “Cook’s Country” house in Vermont, chefs in the back kitchen.Credit
Ryan Pfluger for The New York Times

From the start, readers latched onto Kimball’s strange magazine with crablike tenacity. Today, roughly three-quarters of subscribers renew, a rate that’s the envy of publishing. In 2007, they signed up their one millionth subscriber, and over the years Kimball has supersized his idea into a franchise that includes 12 seasons of “America’s Test Kitchen,” the most-watched cooking show on public television; a second magazine, Cook’s Country (with its attendant show); reams of special issues and books; a battery of paid Web sites; a radio program; and even an online cooking school, and he has done it without discounting subscriptions or giving anything away or taking on a single advertiser.

C.I.’s headlines, like Kimball himself, don’t truck in false modesty. Invariably the recipes are “better” or “best,” never just worthwhile variations, and their preparation tends to be “easy” or at least “easier,” and even “American classics” don’t make it into print unless they’ve been “improved.” Kimball’s bravado relies on a set of convictions that provoke much low-frequency grumbling among competitors. “Most cookbook authors don’t care what happens to their recipe when it enters your home,” Kimball insists at Le Bernardin. In bighearted moods, he describes the C.I. approach as “why bad things happen to good recipes.” The corollary is his belief that empirically rigorous testing always leads to the best preparation, just as blind tastings — another staple of Kimball’s products — will always winnow out the best brand of crunchy peanut butter or microwave popcorn. To the relativists — those Pollyannas who insist that cooking is as much an art as a science and that a recipe’s effectiveness depends mostly on what a particular cook enjoys eating — Kimball has this to offer: “Cooking isn’t creative, and it isn’t easy. It’s serious, and it’s hard to do well, just as everything worth doing is damn hard.” With this he takes off his spectacles and rubs his eyes, looking like a riled-up border-town newspaperman in a Western, a simile he would no doubt enjoy.

If you’ve ever tuned in to watch Kimball rolling out dough or spooning into a piece of cobbler on “America’s Test Kitchen,” you probably remember the genial dweeb he plays on television. His bow tie, suspenders and owlish glasses compound his already unvigorous features and oatmeally complexion, and he’s spectrally thin, so the most common Kimball descriptor is “nerd.” At 61, Kimball appears fond of this in a hard-bitten kind of way, so when a fake blog post attributed to the famously belligerent chef Gordon Ramsay referred to Kimball as a “Poindexter,” Kimball, thinking the post was real, tweeted to Ramsay his thanks. The nerd thing is a misperception. He does not, as some viewers must believe, descend from actuaries, and to spend time in Kimball’s presence is to recognize the expensive tailoring of his clothes and their studied flamboyance. When I sat beside him at C.I.’s Tuesday-morning editorial meeting, Kimball was shod in fire-engine red Italian oxfords and had draped a long scarf of some kind of really good angora-type fabric around his shoulders, so the cumulative effect — imposing and more than a little louche — was that of power and wealth expressed through anachronism.

I was at the meeting for the unveiling of the Perfect Soft-Boiled Egg. It’s one of those recipes that isolate the weird, wayward essence of the Cook’s Illustrated project, a seemingly boner-proof preparation that, when fixed with Kimball’s unsparing eye, reveals itself to be fundamentally broken. And therein lies the narrative arc of the C.I. recipe — invariably it begins with the insuperable flaw, that through toil and experimentation is resolved in a sudden, improbable revelation that, in-house, is known as the aha moment. By far the most commonly occurring aha moments involve baking soda and gelatin. Others include browning butter for Perfect Chocolate Chip Cookies and presoaking no-boil noodles to make Spinach Lasagna. C.I.’s Classic Spaghetti and Meatballs for a Crowd, which calls for roasting the meatballs on a wire rack and adding gelatin, can be said to have not one but two aha moments. (An authentic aha moment has to be unexpected and original — a recipe can’t be fixed by something as banal as shortening the cooking time or cutting the flour by a third.) Kimball compares the arc to that of a Sherlock Holmes whodunit, and no recipe ratchets the stakes higher than the Perfect Soft-Boiled Egg, a single-ingredient obstacle course that turns entirely on technique.

The P.S.B.E. is slated for the January/February issue and falls to Andrea Geary, from the magazine’s stable of overeducated, underpaid editor/cooks who research, test and write the stories. While the 20ish editors around the table resemble bright children at a model U.N. convocation, Geary, a hale, wiry 46, is the one you want beside you aboard the helicopter when smoke begins to billow from the controls. Her mien expresses unfussy competence; before coming to the magazine, Geary cooked at an inn on the Scottish Highlands, roasting venison in a coal-burning stove for hunting parties of drunk Italians. Even among the high-strung editorial ranks at C.I., Geary is considered a little intense.

If you’re wondering what could be especially difficult about boiling an egg, you should have heard her. The Flaw — the unappetizing probability of either a chalky yolk or a runny white — occurs because the yolk gets cooked before the white, and the desired temperature window turns out to be harrowingly small, so the ideal preparation must set the white while leaving the yolk custardy, and not do it too rapidly. Oh, and tossing a fridge-temperature egg into boiling water will cause the air inside to expand and sometimes crack it, and apparently no two cooks can agree on exactly what simmering means, and third, the number of eggs must be compensated for by adjusting the amount of boiling water to keep cooking time constant. Geary recited further facts imperiling the P.S.B.E., and after a while the difficulty of boiling an egg at home with anything like success sounded to be on the order of a bone-marrow transplant. This appeared to please everyone, particularly Kimball, and the meeting moved on to Dressing Up Meatloaf.

“Most magazines don’t write about failure, but we do,” Kimball told me later. “Disaster in the kitchen puts the reader at ease, and that’s why we start our recipes with it.” The P.S.B.E.’s first hurdle was a tasting of five existing recipes, and by everyone’s reckoning, their odds of passing muster at C.I. were close to nil. As it happens, “America’s Test Kitchen” is an actual place inside Kimball’s company, Boston Common Press, and it’s a hangar-size expanse of gleaming culinaria where throngs of aproned test cooks and interns turn the wheels of his enterprise. Somewhere amid 8 ranges and 32 ovens, Geary was cooking eggs; one recipe originated from “Larousse Gastronomique,” the thick, fusty tome, another from Wikipedia. The digital timers commenced to beep and Geary scooped out the eggs and cut into a few; the yolks were still runny and the whites looked barely set, but when the staff lined up to taste, a few minutes later, every one was basically hard-boiled. While a poached egg stops cooking when taken out of the water, the soft-boiled version traps heat inside the shell and continues to cook. The staff members poked at the gluey eggs but no one wanted to taste one; the magazine cannot demand that they be eaten straight out of the pot, and so the recipes were deemed complete failures. Geary swept 30 overcooked eggs into the trash. “I thought that went pretty well,” she said.

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A control room in the living room.Credit
Ryan Pfluger for The New York Times

Readers of Kimball’s Page 1 editorial in C.I.’s November-December 1995 issue might have been nonplused to read, in what would become a piecemeal memoir set in rural Vermont, about Herbie the hired hand, who “died two years ago up in Rutland — found frozen in the cab of a parked semi.” It was the first sign that the kind of sun-dappled reveries about country living sometimes found in cooking magazines wouldn’t be on offer in this one; as a prose stylist, Kimball trades “cookbook pastoral” for “thresher gothic.” He writes about the locals with such misty reverence that you’d think he were Gauguin in Tahiti and that his odes to haying, sugaring and a New England past “when hard work, thrift and self-reliance were the coin of the realm” were larded with Proustian longing. Yet passages of bottomless ickiness come spring-loaded with genuinely unsettling episodes about the dangers of modern convenience and, of all things, death’s inevitability. For every mention of turkey fatigue or homemade soda bread, Kimball conjures enough mountain-road auto wrecks, equine tramplings and corn-chopper dismemberments to max out a police blotter. (In one editorial, a neighbor discovers a mass grave in some woods near Kimball’s home.) Much of the rest is just weird. Kimball considers dog-powered washing machines, describes a cave where locals take children for some kind of homegrown Meso-American initiation rite and rewards the patient reader with epigrammatic gems like, “If you had walked across this country a hundred years ago, you probably wouldn’t have eaten the same biscuit twice” and “When it comes to eating out, I have grown quite fond of church suppers” and “squirrel is mild and lean.”

Like most things about Kimball, the facts of his biography are more convoluted than those of the public persona. Just how much more is something I discovered while he talked about the summer after he graduated from high school, when he enlisted in an overland trek from London to Nairobi, traveling with fellow Phillips Exeter students in a caravan of Land Rovers. (One of their chaperones was an English teacher with a bent for Indian spirituality and encounter groups; that one of the country’s top prep academies countenanced a three-month trip across war-torn Africa can be construed only as a curiosity of the late-’60s.) Kimball concedes the trip was “totally ill advised,” particularly in light of the group’s nearly expiring of thirst after taking a detour through the Sahara — Kimball recalls passing dead camels — and being taken prisoner after speeding through a Congolese Army roadblock. “It was at night, and they had put us in a little hut,” Kimball recalls, “and the guy in charge wasn’t there, and the No. 2 guy wanted to kill us.” After the scare, the students needed to unwind. “There were Pygmies in this village,” Kimball recalled. “They were sitting on huge truck tires. I remember one night, we sat around a campfire and we got them high. We took out this huge joint, and everyone smoked dope and got high with a bunch of Pygmies in the Congo.”

Many readers assume that Kimball is from Vermont — he writes often that he grew up there — but he spent most of his childhood in an affluent section of Westchester County, N.Y., in a household straight out of a Cheever story. He remembers mixing old-fashioneds for his father, a management consultant in Manhattan, and among his first memories of food was the fried chicken and okra prepared by their hired cook, who later worked for the Rockefellers. Kimball calls his father “an observer of life.” It was his mother, Mary Alice — a Washington debutante, a Columbia University psychology professor and possibly a Communist — who figured most vividly in his early life. Her father, who was J. Edgar Hoover’s physician, maintained a hobby farm in Virginia, and memories of her time there convinced Mary Alice to buy a parcel of bottomland by the Green River in southwest Vermont, where the family spent summers and some weekends. Despite her husband’s lack of interest, she built a rudimentary farm, bought several dozen head of Angus cattle and some Yorkshire pigs, paid a local farmer to slaughter them and even started a concern called the Green River Farm. Kimball recalls trips they took to sell meat to local restaurants out of ice-filled trunks. Mary Alice also taught the children to fish and hunt and gave each of them a .22 by their 12th birthdays. One afternoon, while Kimball’s father stood lecturing about gun safety, Mary Alice grabbed the rifle out of her son’s hand and shot a bird off a wire.

Kimball eventually enrolled at Columbia, where he majored in primitive art, drove a cab and hung out at a “Deadhead fraternity” on 114th Street. “I went to my first Grateful Dead show in February 1970,” Kimball recalls. “The concerts would start at 11 at night, and at 5 in the morning I’d get out, as the sun was rising. I never got over that.” He was accepted into a Ph.D. program in oceanic art history at Cornell but decided not to go, not certain what to do instead. “I was lost,” he says. Eventually he happened into a job selling seminars on publishing and direct-mail marketing. He moved to Connecticut, cut his hair and married. It was in Westport that he began taking classes at a culinary school run by Malvina Kinard, a middle-aged divorcée and friend of Julia Child. “I drove the instructors crazy,” Kimball recalls. He needled them about minute points of food science — “I wanted to know how much salt was in a pinch, why you have to scald milk to make a béchamel” — and received indignant, unsatisfying answers. Soon after, with seed money raised from his brother-in-law and a handful of investors, he decided he would answer those questions himself by starting a magazine titled, simply, Cook’s.

The venture was, in most ways, doomed. New York-based competitors like Gourmet operated on larger budgets that lent them access to writers, stylists and photographers who remained outside Kimball’s orbit. He was inexperienced and hadn’t isolated the formula that addressed his peculiar, demanding ideas about cooking. “I didn’t yet have the guts to stand up and do what I felt was right, and so Cook’s wasn’t all that different from the competition,” he says. “We didn’t make much money, and I spent that decade in a pretty [expletive] mood.” In the mid-’80s, Kimball formed a partnership with the Swedish-owned Bonnier Group, which bought him out in December 1989. Six months after Kimball sold his share of the magazine, Cook’s was gone. He concentrated on other projects, including a magazine with the hapless title Smart for Men, but couldn’t kick the desire to return to the kitchen.

“When Chris called and said he was starting this black-and-white cooking magazine with no ads, I balked,” says Jack Bishop, C.I.’s editorial director and television taste-test maven. “But my wife said: ‘What do you have to lose? It’ll fold in six months, and you’ll be done with it.’ ” Kimball’s partners at Bonnier introduced him to a magazine-publishing model that was more common in Europe and based on subscription revenue instead of ads. His plan — if it panned out — would free him from not only the treadmill of ad sales but also the product placement and saccharine coverage advertisers expected. He rehired several editors and writers from Cook’s — Bishop, John Willoughby, Pam Anderson and Mark Bittman — and brought on a handful of freelancers. Kimball based the office in Brookline, but editorial meetings happened on the phone or in a New York hotel suite, because the staff remained scattered across the East Coast. “If we get 50,000 subscribers,” Kimball said at the early meetings, “we’re going to be fine.” In late 1993, in the magazine’s fifth issue, he announced that he had 75,000.

It took several years for C.I. to take on its present shape and to jettison elements Kimball considered extraneous — book reviews, articles about New York chefs like Gray Kunz and Bobby Flay and Bittman’s cantankerous wine stories. The magazine’s write-ups of equipment tests and blind tastings relished excoriating purveyors of loosefitting pot lids and mushy chickpeas. Kimball trumpeted about the hypocrisy of the “gourmet police” and gloated in print when New York-based Ronzoni defeated Italian spaghetti brands, and domestic RedPack canned tomatoes beat the famous ones from San Marzano. Kimball was making money and getting noticed by the cooking oligarchs — Julia Child quipped approvingly that “America’s Test Kitchen” is “not a program for fluffies.” Even Bittman, who sums up his personnel moves at the magazine as “I was fired and quit on the same day,” admits that working at C.I. in the early years could be inspiring. “Whatever our differences were,” he adds magnanimously, “the magazine certainly didn’t suck.”

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The barn behind the “Cook’s Country” house.Credit
Ryan Pfluger for The New York Times

Kimball gets a rise out of playing a martinet. He’s engaging in tactical reverse egotism when he describes himself as “a terrible manager,” but he’s not being disingenuous. Once, on an early draft of an article, he wrote, “This is the stupidest thing I’ve read in this or any other magazine.” At the office, which now houses more than 135 employees, he rarely makes eye contact or offers a hello. He admits he has made employees cry. “I used to be brutal,” he says. “I can delegate, but I’ve never been good at nurturing people.” By most accounts, he’s receptive to blunt criticism and remains a hands-off manager; a surprising number of employees, at least those who weathered the initial blast of abrasiveness, have been on staff for 10 years or more. “Chris comes off as arrogant at first, but eventually you realize it’s his awkwardness,” an editor told me, speaking, as others did, on the condition of anonymity because they still worked for Kimball. “Once he feels comfortable around you, he is probably warmer than he’d like to appear.” Fortunately for Kimball, the magazine attracts the kind of A-type true believers willing to overlook an occasional decorum lapse. “Maybe he doesn’t say hello to you in the hall the first two years,” says a former editor. “But who else is going to let you run up a $1,000 meat tab to make ribs?”

Like many self-invented people, Kimball is watchful and innately shy, and he relies on self-effacing jokes and bluster to mask an ever-present discomfort. Which may or may not explain his perplexing love for being on camera. Kimball’s signature bit on “America’s Test Kitchen” — walk-ons in seasonal-Halloween-shop costumes — is so sophomoric that it’s actually touching. The man who describes an ideal weeknight as a few hours spent alone with a history book is the same one who appears on camera at 8 the following morning in a head-to-toe peach costume, complete with tights and puffy white gloves.

Watching the early episodes can be borderline painful. Everything about the first season looks as if a busload of graduate students in sociology occupied a TV station and decided to create programming. The set is tenebrous with slasher-sequel gloom, and the cast appears breathless with fear. There’s truly cringeworthy flirting between Kimball and Bridget Lancaster (B.L.: cutting into a roast chicken: “So juicy, it’s squirting all over the place”) and the frequent unintentional jokes that threaten to capsize the proceedings (“It’s time to flip the bird”) are made unspeakably worse by the smothered fits of cackling that follow. The impression is of a camera crew that simply walked into the office and began filming. “That’s pretty much what happened,” says Julia Collin Davison, a kitchen assistant conscripted onto the show who became one of its mainstays. “You can see the stress-blindness on our faces.” Willoughby, who was handed the show’s science segment, agrees. “Those shows are pretty rough-looking,” he says. “I think what appealed to viewers was how real they were.” When I mentioned this to Kimball, he grinned: “That’s what people always say when you suck at something.”

For a week or two, Andrea Geary’s attempt to bulletproof the egg looked as if it would veer into the Fudge Zone. Old-Fashioned Chocolate Fudge is the recipe everyone at C.I. mentions as the ultimate kitchen calamity — a project that, despite sound intentions, a proven methodology and rivers of brow sweat, wound up on the scrap heap. For whatever reason, it became indexed in my mind as the Bataan Death Fudge. David Pazmiño, a test cook, spent four months stir-and-lifting the New England boardwalk confection, trying to solve the problem of the ultraprecise temperatures required in candy making. The stiffening fudge required real arm muscle to agitate, and soon the 200-plus-pound Pazmiño reaggravated an old injury, inflamed an excruciating case of tendinitis and took to wearing a thumb brace around the office. More than 1,000 pounds of fudge later, the recipe wouldn’t work without a candy thermometer, a tool Kimball judged too exotic for the home kitchen, and so Old-Fashioned Chocolate Fudge became a cautionary tale. “The poor guy left soon after that,” Kimball says, “and I think the fudge may have had something to do it.” In fact, Pazmiño stayed on for another 18 months after the O.F.C.F. debacle, but he did vent to me for a spell. “Sometimes you have to walk away from it,” he said. “And of course you can’t look at fudge again.”

At the test kitchen in Brookline, Geary’s Calvinist assault on the egg reached a make-or-break point, and echoes of fudge couldn’t be far from her mind. On advice from a Harvard food scientist named Guy Crosby, Geary separated the yolks from the whites, poured them into beakers rigged with precision thermometers and heated them in a pot of water. She ascertained that while the yolks stiffen at 158 degrees, the dominant protein in the whites, ovalbumin, doesn’t set until 180. Having eliminated boiling and simmering for aforementioned reasons of breakage and vagueness, respectively, Geary settled on steaming. After tests showed that changing the eggs’ position in the steamer basket (on the side, standing in a bottle cap with the round end up and the pointy end up) elicited no meaningful differences and further tests determined that steaming for seven minutes followed by a minute in an ice-water bath (to arrest the cooking) yielded the most appetizing egg, and even more tests convinced Geary that adding eggs to the pot didn’t affect cooking time, crisis struck. Identically cooked eggs were turning out differently. Roughly half the eggs revealed off-center yolks that turned stiff and chalky at the edge while the whites remained oozy at the center. The cruelty of this development — was nature itself mocking us? — set the teeth on edge. This juncture was where I would have gotten into the walk-in-pantry tequila, but Geary, made of sterner timber, shut herself in the bathroom with the lights off.

She was following a tangent. Geary duct-taped a toilet-paper roll core to the business end of a flashlight, and in the bathroom’s humid dark she beamed the contraption through two dozen white eggs to locate the yolks’ shadows, which she marked on the shells with a Sharpie (brown eggs were impervious to the device’s low-wattage luminance). Muted ahhs of scientific inquiry could be heard behind the door. A pair of fibrous strands called chalazae anchor the yolk inside the egg, and Geary figured that sundering them would allow the yolk to float to the center. She tried spinning one, dreidel-style, but it skittered off the counter and narrowly missed my shoe. Geary had another idea; she gave six eggs an ear-level shake, looking for a moment like an Afro-Cuban percussionist, and then dropped them in the steam. We waited, perspiring from the heat and expectation. Taste tests were happening around us in “America’s Test Kitchen,” and I began to anxiously nibble a round of a sausage log from the Catalan-Style Beef Stew recipe that was being evaluated at the adjacent counter. Soon the kitchen went quiet in anticipation. When Geary finally sliced the cooling eggs in half, delectably runny yolks glistened in the precise centers of the barely set whites. Astonishment. This mother of all aha moments made me feel as if I just watched a high-school point guard heave a winning 55-foot jump shot at the buzzer, but Geary merely slipped the digital timer back into the breast pocket of her smock and announced her transition to layering meringues. (It came to pass, months later, that fickle Friends of Cook’s scuttled the shaking — apparently it caused their eggs to explode — and Geary settled on a less-inspired method, but at the moment we stood basking in achievement.) Geary permitted herself only a wily grin, a look after having beaten the Perfect Soft-Boiled Egg that seemed to say, “C’est la guerre.”

Later, after she e-mailed her voluminous test notes to Kimball, he wrote back, “I submit.”

There was barely light in the windows of radio station WGBH, but Kimball was at the microphone, haranguing the deputy secretary of agriculture, Kathleen Merrigan, about the laxity of the government’s organic-labeling program. Merrigan was drowsy, and the pollen was bothering her eyes, but Kimball was wide-awake. “Eight o’clock,” he practically hollered, spiking the meters. “It’s lunchtime!” He pressed her on synthetic fertilizers, nitrogen-treated tomatoes, soil depletion and pasturing, at one point floating the idea that the U.S.D.A. is little more than the lobbying arm of Big Agribusiness. Merrigan countered with the kind of upbeat platitudes most effective bureaucrats are practiced at, but Kimball dug in. “It’s no guarantee that it will taste better, it’s no guarantee that animal welfare was better, there’s no real guarantee that it’s environmentally more sustainable,” he intoned, “so I wonder whether the term ‘organic’ has that much meaning.” After the mikes were off, he conceded grudgingly that the agency does require that organic meat be antibiotic-free and crops be rotated, but the subject stuck in his craw, mostly because organic costs more and, worse, smacks of elitism.

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A bowl of Slow-Cooker Minestrone.Credit
Ryan Pfluger for The New York Times

The interview was one of those times when it became clear that Kimball’s obsession isn’t cooking, or even food per se, but their social context and potency as metaphors. He may be the sole person associated with food journalism to remark, “There’s something about pleasure I find annoying.” Pam Anderson compares Kimball to a frustrated minister, and Kimball does admit to having delivered a few sermons at his pocket-size Vermont church. He dislikes politics and keeps his affiliations opaque, but when I pointed out that some of his writing bears a passing resemblance to campaign pronouncements by Rick Santorum, he was quick to call the former senator and his ilk a “bunch of idiots.” His real difficulty as an evangelist, however, is the one afflicting most multimillionaires who expound publicly on the virtues of simple living. His magazines and books have made him very rich — the company remains privately held, and while Kimball won’t disclose hard figures, he does admit, and not without pleasure, that annual revenues are well over $50 million. His homilies about pickup-driving agrarians are complicated by the fact that Kimball has been known to arrive at work in a Maserati and labors at macaroni-and-cheese recipes in adjacent bow-front brownstones in Boston’s South End that his employees sometimes call “Chris’s double-wide.”

Kimball’s success and his faith in empirical perfection tend to provoke asperity from competitors. “Those recipes stifle the home cook,” argues the Times’s food writer Melissa Clark, “because they leave no room for options. Only you know how much garlic you like and how much salt you prefer.” Anderson, who wrote C.I.’s most famous recipe, the Brined Turkey, after finding the technique in a book on Portuguese cookery, concurs: “The approach can breed arrogance, because the readers are armed with all this information but don’t know it for themselves. Besides, who’s to say what’s perfect?” (Anderson left the company in 1999.) Yet even skeptics admit they read the magazine. “At least one thing in those anal compendia turns out to be eternal,” says the recipe developer Karen Rush, citing the chipotle-hamburger recipe. The food writer Francis Lam told me: “There’s always been something punk rock about Cook’s Illustrated. It spoke to me as a young culinary-school student, because it was all about the food. No cool-looking people, no rustic farm tables — who else is doing that?”

What few quibble with is Kimball’s grasp of the magazine business. “I think he’s a genius,” says Ruth Reichl, the former editor of Gourmet. “He gives his readers exactly what they want while managing to repurpose every recipe six or seven times.” Privately, some editors at C.I. complain that Kimball’s business model sometimes works too well. SurveyMonkey, the software that keeps them in touch with readers, informs every aspect of the editorial process — when a test cook wondered whether most readers had access to shallots, SurveyMonkey told them they did. One consequence of a participatory approach to content is the readers’ tendency to pass on their contradictions. “When we survey, everyone tells us they want healthy, low-fat recipes, but then no one wants to make them,” an editor says. “They want dinner to take 20 minutes, but they want it to taste like it took all day.” It turns out that readers tend to return to the familiar — to date, Kimball’s magazines have published eight iterations of meatloaf — and, until recently, snubbed ethnic cooking. “Getting international recipes into the magazine was like pulling teeth,” an editor tells me. When they do make it into print, the recipes survey better after they’ve been decoded into familiar language: Thai-Style Stir-Fried Noodles With Chicken and Broccolini will get a more enthusiastic response than Pad See Ew. The readers’ prejudices dovetail neatly with Kimball’s. “We’re doing Saag Paneer,” he announced one morning. “Everyone here loved it except me — all that army green goop, you’ve got to be out of your mind! But we publish what our readers want, not what Christopher Kimball wants. I’m happier eating hoagies.”

That, too, is the reason he offers for mostly shunning issues like nutrition, obesity and food politics. “I don’t think anyone picks up Cook’s Illustrated to be preached at,” he says (ignoring the rampant contradictions). He happens to have a point. According to reader surveys, the editorials — in which Kimball preaches on more existential subjects — remain C.I.’s least popular section. When I pressed him about the business logic of continuing to print them, he tried a few tenuous rationales, finally landing on, “This is my magazine, and I will print what I want.”

One day, after a month of making nothing but C.I. recipes, of crumbling goat cheese onto bow-tie pasta and wilting arugula, I had a disquieting urge for a burger. I began making them as a TV-addled middle schooler, filling my mother’s kitchen with curlicues of black smoke and spattering the range top with corn oil, and something about those latchkey dinners struck me as comforting. I invited four friends who really like to eat to my minuscule city backyard for a cookout, but on the appointed Sunday, I found myself nervous as a bride. I’d grilled dozens of burgers, but in truth I usually stumbled into a conversation midway, forgetting the coals and scorching the meat into gritty dryness, or I take them off the heat too early, forcing guests to smile at me through mouthfuls of raw, reddish chuck. So I trolled the C.I. Web site for help and finally settled on a shortcut, a kind of insurance policy — I borrowed an aha moment from Stovetop Well-Done Hamburgers and spiked the beef with garlic, steak sauce and panade, a paste of bread and milk used to keep meatloaf from drying out.

Before heading to the supermarket, I jotted down a list of taste-test and gadget-shootout winners, each one heartily recommended by the editors. In the yard, beside the lettuce and Cheddar slices, I set out jars of Heinz organic tomato ketchup (“well-rounded ketchupy flavor”), Grey Poupon Dijon mustard (“nice balance of sweet, tangy and sharp”) and Bubbie’s bread and butter pickles (“subtle, briny tang”). I fired up the coals on a Weber One Touch Gold charcoal grill (“no-frills grill gets the job done”) in a Weber Rapidfire chimney starter (“adequate for most grill sizes”). C.I. offers no recommendation for buns, so I winged those.

With the guests assembled, I grilled in silence, clutching the recipe ridiculously in an oven mitt. Finally I bit into a burger. It was juicy, just pink enough in the middle. I asked for honest reactions, and while some groused about the lack of strong beef flavor, everyone acknowledged that the burgers were ably cooked and moist. Later, after more beer, it was revealed that others found the char wimpy and the texture too much like meatloaf. I nodded in pretend agreement.

A few days later, I told Kimball about the burgers over dinner; we were at the Russian Samovar in Manhattan, where rowdy pretheater parties exchanged shots and a cue-ball-headed pianist behind a white baby grand flailed at a Chopin mazurka. After three or four tarragon-infused vodkas, Kimball, too, turned unlaced and voluble, giving the self-deprecating jokes and Latin references a rest. “We don’t make the ultimate anything,” he said. “Were they the world’s best burgers — no, probably not. But if you get food on the table and it works, we’ve done our jobs.”

Back in the yard, under a neighbor’s clothes drying on a line, the fixings and the meat were gone, and there was errant ketchup on the table. A cold wind lifted up dust and dead leaves, signaling that it was time to head inside. I lingered for a while because of a heedless emotion in my chest, rising like heat after a swig of bourbon, and it took me a moment to identify it as pride. For the first time, my burgers were perfect.

Correction: October 28, 2012

An article on Oct. 14 about the chef Christopher Kimball misstated the source of a 2007 blog post in which Kimball was called a ‘‘Poindexter.’’ Though attributed to Gordon Ramsay, the British chef and entrepreneur, the post was fabricated and posted by the Web site newsgroper.com.

Correction: December 14, 2012

Because of an editing error, a headline on Oct. 14 for a recipe with an article about Christopher Kimball, the host of the TV show "America's Test Kitchen" referred imprecisely to the discovery of "Foolproof Pie Dough." It was developed by a test-kitchen team led by J. Kenji Lopez-Alt, not by Kimball.

Alex Halberstadt is the author of ‘‘Lonely Avenue: The Unlikely Life and Times of Doc Pomus.’’